Re: postfix causing very high load average

[Sagi Bashari]

That's where I took the original command from.

I can't change the partition settings or repartition the harddisk because /var is a very big partition that is also used for data (database,web).

However i have empty 6GB partition on the harddisk. I don't need that much for spool directory, is it possible to repartition the harddisk while the RAID (linux MD raid) is working? the linux software raid howto says that you shouldn't. Is there any reason for this? (after you turn off the RAID on the partition that you want to delete, ofcourse).

Is it possible to create virtual partition on a file (using another filesystem format)?

Sagi

On 14/11/2002 15:15, Henry Ficher wrote:

Take a look here:

http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb/postfix/ext3.shtml

Cheers,

Henry

Sagi Bashari wrote:

On 14/11/2002 13:51, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Sagi Bashari wrote:

Hi,

I just setuped a new server. It is only running postfix at this time,
relaying mail from another server.

The distribution is RedHat 7.3 with all of the updates.

There is a large amount of mail in the queue (about 17k mails).

The load average goes upto 8.x. If I kill postfix, it goes back down to
0.x. The strange thing is that top shows that the cpu usage is pretty low:
CPU0 states:1.2% user, 3.2% system, 0.4% nice, 95.1% idle
CPU1 states:1.4% user, 2.3% system, 0.4% nice, 95.3% idle

Looks like the machine is over-swapping.

Actually, it's not swapping at all:
[sagi@black sagi]$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1006 991 14 0 151 547
-/+ buffers/cache: 293 712
Swap: 1992 0 1992
[sagi@black sagi]$

Hardware is not the problem. The machine is a dual Athlon MP 2000 with
1GB of DDRAM and 2 IDE hdds with 8MB cache in RAID1. It should be able
to handle that kind of work without any problem.

I'm using ext3.

Any ideas/suggestions?

Maybe limit the number of postfix processes (of some kind?)

No, it's not that:
[sagi@black sagi]$ ps auxww|grep -ic postfix
77
[sagi@black sagi]$

Use postfix's various concurrecy limitations.

Have a look at http://postfix.openu.ac.il/rate.html

After looking in the postfix users archive, I suspect that it is a filesystem issue. I ran 'chattr -R -S +A' on the queue spool dir like someone suggested there (to disable atime/sync updates). It did reduce the load a bit, but it is still too high.

Sagi

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